dried his clothes by the kitchen fire, hating the woolly smell of the
steam. Later he slept in the haymow and lay awake far into the night,
listening in doubt and despair to the drip of the rain on the roof.
Nothing ever went quite right. He must read again in Brian's letter
about the Tavern of Stars. Beldame Rain seemed bent upon a
housecleaning. Kenny, dreaming, departed from the barn in a flying
machine made of lilacs. Its planes, he regretted, seemed merely sheets
of rain, specked foolishly with pine-needles.

He awoke to a subdued noise of voices in the barn below and wondered
disapprovingly if the farmer was just getting home. It appeared that
he was getting up. Horribly depressed and sorry for him, Kenny went to
sleep again. When he awoke the sun was laughing iridescently from
meadow trails of rain. The fragrance of wet pine came in through the
barn window. The lilac in the garden was ready to flower. Kenny
longed to be off. Nevertheless he breakfasted at some length in the
farm kitchen and paid so handsomely in coin and grace that there was
talk of him for days.

Already the sun was warm. It lay in a blanket of bright gold
everywhere. Cloud shadows deepened a meadow here and there to
coolness. The air was tonic, deliriously wine-sweet and heady. Kenny
thought of honey and bees and clover and tramped and brooded.

The sun he hoped would presently abate its unromantic fervor. Meantime
he must think. Penance or the tribute of impatience? Which should it
be?

It remained for an abandoned corncrib to plunge him into his original
fever of inspiration and remorse. Brian had lived in a corncrib for